1. Field
The disclosure herein relates generally to the management of sales leads. More specifically, the disclosure relates to methods of handling and distributing leads to multiple remote sales points, as well as tracking their results.
2. Description of Related Art
Many businesses involved in sales attempt to generate and utilize leads in order to create new business and increase sales. Leads can be generated in many different ways. For example, a customer of the business might refer a new customer, resulting in a lead for that new customer. Or, potential customer might request information from the company, resulting in a lead for that potential customer. Often, lists of people and associated demographic data are purchased from business that assemble and sell such lists, and the information is used to develop potential leads for would-be customers. As is well-understood in the business world, leads can manifest in a variety of different forms, and can be valuable tools for new business generation if used effectively.
Unfortunately, very large companies with multiple points of distribution and sales are faced with difficulties in harnessing and utilizing their leads. Although large expenditures of time and money are often incurred to generate and develop leads, effective use and implementation of the leads has proven to be a formidable task. For example, large automobile manufacturers or distributors typically sell their products through numerous independent dealerships that may be located all across an entire country. This requires application of the distributor's leads in many locations that are remote from the distributor itself, leaving the distributor with little, if any, control over how the leads are utilized, and making it difficult to track the success of lead follow-up efforts. The remote dealerships often rely on the distributor for advertising of the product and generation of leads. However, managing leads that are received by the distributor as a result of these advertising and lead generation efforts, funneling those leads to the numerous, remote independent dealerships, and tracking the follow-up efforts made for the leads, is a complicated process. There are many problems associated with attempting to centrally manage leads intended for distribution to remote locations.
First of all, because leads are generated in a variety of different ways and take numerous different forms, it can be difficult process multiple leads. The data formats of the leads may vary, and the type of information may also vary, from one lead source to the next. Supporting all possible types of incoming leads can be complicated and inefficient. Second, with an extremely large force of dealers and sales points, the process of identifying which dealers are best-suited to which incoming leads can also be complex. Moreover, asserting control over how the leads are handled by remote dealers may be difficult or nearly impossible for the centralized lead reception point. Even retaining feedback from dealers regarding the usefulness of leads they receive, and whether the leads resulted in ultimate sales, can be complicated and inefficient, because of the independence with which each dealer may be free to operate. Dealers of different sizes and varying geographic locations may have different business requirements, different operations, and different needs. Thus, various types of lead management software applications will appeal to different dealers. Accordingly, dealers routinely use various types of lead management software, often presenting a significant problem to companies who attempt to receive and process feedback from these different programs. Essentially, the distributor may need to stand ready to support data from every possible lead management software application available on the market. However, this task may be too formidable to be efficiently or effectively achieved using state of the art methods. The result may be that companies spend large amounts of time and money to develop and distribute leads to their product dealers, yet have an impaired ability to efficiently distribute these leads or to track the success of distributed leads.